Recent content by dpm

If you're using standard library functions, most programming language standards will specify the mandatory asymptotic running time in the standard. If you're wanting to analyse your own code, then a good book (the standard in universities, pretty much), is Introduction to Algorithms by CLRS.

I'm a final year AI + CS undergrad. As a CS major you should try to take a few courses on computability, complexity theory and logic - these are really the heart of CS.

0rthodontist, I just placed my order for the book that you suggested ($3!). Thanks for the advice.

0rthodontist, thank you for the recommendation, I'll look it up. neurocomp2003, I'm not particularly looking to do practical stuff, I'm interested in learning maths. I mentioned my computer science background to show what foundation I have to work from. I'll highlight a particular problem...

From what I understand, the latest research suggests a Cantorian style revolution is needed before P=?=NP can even be touched. The mathematics that we have simply isn't sophisticated enough to get near it.

I'm a third year CS/AI student. I love computer science but I also love mathematics and I sometimes wish that I studied maths outright or at least did a CS/maths joint degree. As part of my degree, I've had to study two years of maths, as well as be able to pick further "theoretical courses"...

Such a class is called an immutable class. They can be useful in certain circumstances and may help the compiler with optimisation.

Look, my argument is pretty simple. You relegate object oriented languages from a family to a feature that can be implemented on top of other languages, leaving only two families, imperative and functional. The fact that object oriented features can be implemented within a language is not...

He means represent your number as a string of characters and then write some routines to compute with the numbers. C's built in numerical types have a limited range, but if you write your own "big number" routines, the range is potentially infinite (given enough memory, of course).

Don't you have to distribute the .net runtime with your application though? This may be a problem if you are targetting PCs with not many resources, as you state in the OP. IIRC, the runtime is about 20MB in size.

Which makes no sense. If you're going to analyse the families in that amount of detail you'll quickly discover that there's only one family: functional languages can have imperative features and imperative languages can have functional features. Take a look at the boost library for C++...

The "write once, run anywhere" motto espoused by Sun Microsystems is a joke. Only the most trivial of Java programs will behave in exactly the same way on a Windows machine as on a Sun box.

There's different families of languages. Imperative: C, Pascal etc. Object Oriented: Smalltalk, Lisp (with CLOS) Functional: Haskell, Standard ML (nearly functional), Lisp Declarative: Prolog Concurrent: Parlog Imperative and object oriented languages tend to dominate the market and...

Yes, I know that. I just got mixed up and thought that it should be explicitly stated that it is returning something. Apparently conversion operators don't have to have an explicitly stated return type. http://www.boost.org/libs/smart_ptr/smart_ptr.htm"

You probably can, but I'm at a loss as to why you would want to. You'll suffer from poorer visibility when approaching or merging with traffic. It's probably a lot safer (and cheaper) to rent a standard minibus.